Five things you should know about Lee Square and Pensacola’s Confederate monument

As Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward moves forward with plans to remove Pensacola’s most prominent Confederate monument, here are five things you should know about the history of both the monument and Lee Square.

A portion of the original “Watson Map” of Pensacola, depicting Florida, Georgia, and Alabama squares. (State Archives of Florida/Special to The Pulse)

1. Before 1889, Lee Square was named Florida Square.

Originally, Lee Square was named Florida Square — one of a trio of squares in North Hill named for the states of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.

Located along Palafox Street on high ground which the British had called “Gage Hill,” Florida Square overlooked the city’s downtown and was home to the city’s first public school — erected on the square in 1886 and renamed Pensacola High School in 1905.

In the years following Reconstruction, a wave of Confederate revisionism often called the “Lost Cause” movement swept the South, seeking to reframe and romanticize the war as an honorable struggle for the Southern way of life and to minimize the role of slavery as a central cause of the war.

Despite the fact that Pensacola played a minor role in the Civil War and was under Confederate control for just 16 months, from January 1861 to May 1862, the city wasn’t immune to the Lost Cause movement. In 1889, the city commission renamed Florida Square in honor of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a man with no particular connection to Pensacola. Records indicate Lee likely only ever set foot in Pensacola one time, in 1846, visiting Fort Pickens in his role as a U.S. Army engineer as part of a tour of U.S. coastal defenses.

Lee Square with Pensacola High School in the background, date unknown. (UWF Archives/Special to The Pulse)

2. The monument was dedicated on June 17, 1891.

The Confederate monument at Lee Square was a decade in the making, dating back to an unsuccessful 1881 effort to erect such a monument in Tallahassee, the state capitol. In 1890, Confederate veteran and railroad tycoon William Dudley Chipley revived the project in Pensacola, and on August 15 of that year, the Ladies Confederate Monument Association of Pensacola was established to plan and execute the monument.

Over the next nine months, the Association staged a series of events to raise funds for the monument, which cost a total of $5,000 — about $135,000 in today’s dollars. Built by J. F. Manning & Company of Washington, D.C., the monument is made of granite from Richmond, Va. — one-time capital of the Confederacy — and stands about 50 feet tall.

The monument’s dedication was originally scheduled for June 3, the birthday of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, but was delayed by two weeks due to a lost shipment and the illness of the project’s foreman. The June 17 dedication ceremony was attended by thousands of Pensacolians and visitors from across the state. At 4:00 p.m., a procession paraded up Palafox Street to the square, where those assembled sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” the band played “Dixie,” and Florida Governor Francis P. Fleming spoke to the crowd.

Looking north at Pensacola’s Lee Square Confederate monument, 1903. (Library of Congress/Special to The Pulse)

3. The renamed square and monument were approved after former Confederates overthrew the city government.

In the years following the Civil War, Pensacola’s city government was controlled by Republicans — the party of Lincoln — and even included black and creole aldermen. Meanwhile, many former Confederates flocked to the Democratic Party.

In 1885, four years before Florida Square was renamed for Lee, Florida Gov. Edward Aylesworth Perry — a Democrat, Pensacola native, and Confederate veteran — convinced the state legislature to revoke Pensacola’s charter, effectively seizing control of the city government. The legislature dissolved the Republican city government and replaced it with the “Provisional Municipality of Pensacola,” governed by a state-appointed commission which Perry filled with Democrats. It’s this body that renamed the park and approved plans to erect the Confederate monument.

The Provisional Municipality of Pensacola lasted from 1885 to 1895, when the city adopted a new charter.

4. The monument specifically honors three Confederate figures as well as the “uncrowned heroes” of the Confederacy.

The north, west, and east sides of the monument’s granite base honor Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory and Confederate brigadier general Edward Aylesworth Perry — both of Pensacola — as well as Confederate President Jefferson Davis, whom the monument calls a “soldier, statesman, patriot, Christian, the only man in our nation without a country, yet twenty million people mourn his death.”

The south side, facing downtown Pensacola, features with the large words “Our Confederate Dead” along with the following inscription: “The Uncrowned Heroes of the Southern Confederacy, whose joy was to suffer and die for a cause they believed to be just. Their unchallenged devotion and matchless heroism shall continue to be the wonder and inspiration of the ages.”

The statue atop Pensacola’s Confederate monument is a copy of an earlier monument in Alexandria, Va. (Ser Amantio di Nicolao/Special to The Pulse)

5. The statue at the top of the monument is a copy.

The 8-foot figure that tops the monument’s granite column is a copy of an 1889 statue erected in Alexandria, Va., which was in turn modeled after the painting Appomattox by John Adams Elder, which depicts a solitary Confederate soldier in the aftermath of Lee’s 1865 surrender to Union forces.

In 2016, the Alexandria City Council voted to move the monument to another location, but such moves are barred by Virginia state law, and lawmakers have thus far declined to approve Alexandria’s request for an exemption.

Now is a great time for some very serious house cleaning. Before too much longer, we must stop cheering the blue angels. After all, they are used to promoting the USA’s permanent war strategy, something many observers have many good reasons to view as the biggest scam ever. The time for needless wars and outrageous military spending has past.

It’s readily apparent that most if not all Confederate monuments throughout the South were erected by unrepentant white supremacists as part of a revisionist attempt to whitewash (pun intended) the history of the Civil War, and glorify and romanticize those who led or participated in a truly evil and deservedly defeated cause.

The various states’ declarations of secession make it exquisitely clear what the Civil War was all about. And it was not “state’s rights” or preserving the “Southern way of life.”

Lee was a traitor who took up arms against the United States. The statue in Lee Square should come down with a wrecking ball, and the square itself should re-assume the original Florida Square name.

1. The were erected almost exclusively by the wives, widows, mothers, daughters and sisters of the men who fought, suffered and died horribly to defend them, as much as humanly possible, from a horde of invading barbarians wearing military uniforms.

2. Only four states issued secession declarations. Why did the others secede? Oh, and secession is not war, and the reasons for each were different.

3. Ah, the United States made war on the Confederacy, not the other way around. Lee was defending his state from a brutal invasion.

I agree with Mr. Eduardo Suave: “Lee was a traitor who took up arms against the United States. The statue in Lee Square should come down with a wrecking ball, and the square itself should re-assume the original Florida Square name.”
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The injustices inflicted on people of color are essentially crimes against humanity. The confused, ignorant, hateful men who supported those injustices should NOT be glorified in public places. Let those who think those peoples should be glorified, do it in the privacy of their homes, but not in public, Celebrating/honoring tyrants is one way to disturb the peace, and disturbing the peace like that should be 100% against the law.

Regardless of what the intentions or beliefs were of the people that supported , financed and erected the monument ,”THE BOTTOM LINE IS THE MONUMENT WAS DEDICATED TO MEN THAT LOST THEIR LIVES THREE SPECIFICALLY TWO OF WITCH WERE CITIZENS OF PENSACOLA ” Removing the statue would be no different than
removing the headstone from someone’s grave!

People have no respect these days.

Tho I do agree with changing the name back to Florida square. It should never have been changed in the first place. Lee had no particular connection to Pensacola.

This is not a headstone, nobody is buried up there and the only thing this monument is honoring is the lives of three traitors who happened to be born in Pensacola. Give it to a museum and turn the the park back to Florida Square.

Perry was born in Massachusetts. Mallory was born in Trinidad and Tobago. Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky. You really don’t know much about all this, do you?

Oh, and the monument itself says “OUR CONFEDERATE DEAD.” To the women who raised these monuments, they were indeed headstones for the countless Southern soldiers who never came home, and who lie in graves the location of which is known only to God.

BTW, the feds themselves said Davis was not a traitor ….

“If you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not rebellion. His (Jefferson Davis’s) capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason.” –Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase to Edwin Stanton (The Long Surrender, Burke Davis)

“Davis will be found not guilty and we shall stand there completely beaten.”–Judge Franz Lieber, to the U.S. War Department after studying 270,000 Confederate documents seeking evidence against Jefferson Davis. (The Long Surrender, Burke Davis)

Your ignorance of history, thus your position on memorials, is not surprising…General Perry, a Massachusetts native would be the first to let you know he loved his adopted state which he served as Governor, and the Confederacy which he served throughout the war. The purpose of the memorials was to remember those who fought to repel invaders of their home states and to reassert the values of the American Revolution, which their grandfathers fought in.

I do wish y’all would be more consistent in the reasons we’re supposed to hate these memorials. I mean are we supposed to hate them because they are ominous and intimidating symbols of white oppression of blacks during Jim Crow, or are we supposed to hate them because they were put up by “revisionists” to “minimize the role of slavery…in the war”? I know logic is in short supply these days, but these two arguments, which keep being used together, are pretty much the exact opposite of each other. Pick one! The real revisionists are the pseudo historians of the past 40+ years who have decided they know more about the reasons the war was fought than the men who actually fought it….and the people who have started stirring up these controversies over antique memorials to dead soldiers to further their political agendas. In other places, they’ve suggested adding context to the memorials. Here’s some context. Let’s add a plaque with General Lee’s 1856 statement (5 years before the war) about slavery: “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.” Or how about we add a statue of Jim Limber, the black orphan child the Davis family adopted. That’s some REAL context of who these men REALLY were.

“I think it wiser moreover not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife & to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.” Robert E. Lee.

As a note the first Confederate Officer died in Pensacola on July 5, 1861. He was with a group that became to be known as “Lee’s Tigers” from Louisiana. Now honored by the LSU Tigers. His name was Charles Dreux. He also fought in the Mexican-American War as did most of the Confederate Generals and higher ranking officers. More than 250 West Point Officers resigned from the Union and fought for the South. More than 50 Confederate Generals fought in the Mexican-American War, which added 6 states to America.

Robert E. Lee was in charge of the Mississippi River, first the upper river valley, and then the whole River as his engineering to control the flow of the River earned him the title “The Man who Tamed the Mississippi.” Then opened commerce to New Orleans as a hub, which included trade with Pensacola.

Keeping history in perspective, it might be more practical and instructive to keep the confederate memorials, remove the insulting monuments, and erect in their place monuments in Pensacola that tell both sides of the Civil War and Reconstruction story. Yes, keep them as reminders to never ever repeat the mistakes!